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MISSING FROM THAT BERLIN SPEECH By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe Sunday, July 27, 2008 http://www.boston.com/bosto...
Barack Obama had ample reason to recall the Berlin Airlift of 1948 during his dramatic speech in the German capital last week. The airlift was an early and critical success for the West in the Cold War, with clear relevance to our own time, the war in Iraq, and the free world's conflict with radical Islam. But having reached back 60 years to that pivotal hour of American leadership, Obama proceeded to draw from it exactly the wrong lessons. The Soviet Union had blockaded western Berlin on June 24, 1948, choking off access to the city by land and water and threatening 2.5 million people with starvation. Moscow was determined to force the United States and its allies out of Berlin. To capitulate to Soviet pressure, as Obama rightly noted, "would have allowed Communism to march across Europe." Yet many in the West advocated retreat, fearing that the only way to keep the city open was to use the atomic bomb -- and launch World War III. But for President Truman, retreat was unthinkable. "We stay in Berlin, period," he decreed. Overriding the doubts of senior advisers, including Secretary of State George C. Marshall and General Omar Bradley, the Army Chief of Staff, Truman ordered the Armed Forces to begin supplying Berlin by air. Military planners initially thought that with a "very big operation," they might be able to get 700 tons of food to Berlin. Within weeks, the Air Force was flying in twice that amount every day, as well as supplies of coal. "Pilots and crew were making heroic efforts," David McCullough recorded in his sweeping biography of Truman. "At times planes were landing as often as every four minutes -- British Yorks and Dakotas, America C-47s and the newer, much larger, four-engine C-54s . . . Ground crews worked round the clock. ‘We were proud of our Air Force during the war. We're prouder of it today,’ said The New York Times.”
Yet the pressure to abandon Berlin persisted. The CIA argued that the airlift had worsened matters by "making Berlin a major test of US-Soviet strength" and affirming "direct US responsibility" for West Berlin. The airlift was bound to fail, the intelligence analysts warned. Truman didn't waver. "We'll stay in Berlin -- come what may," he wrote in his diary on July 19. "I don't pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make."
Children in Berlin cheer American planes during the airlift.
It would take nearly a year and more than 277,000 flights, but in the end it was the Soviets who backed down. On May 12, 1949, the blockade ended -- a triumph of American prowess and perseverance, and a momentous vindication for Truman. But not once in his Berlin speech did Obama acknowledge Truman's fortitude, or even mention his name. Nor did he mention the US Air Force, or the 31 American pilots who died during the airlift. Indeed, Obama seemed to go out of his way not to say plainly that what saved Berlin in that dark time was America's military might. Save for a solitary reference to "the first American plane," he never described one of the greatest American operations of the postwar period as an American operation at all. He spoke only of "the airlift," "the planes," "those pilots." Perhaps their American identity wasn't something he cared to stress amid all his "people of the world" salutations and talk of "global citizenship." "People of the world," Obama declaimed, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." But the world *didn't* stand as one during the Cold War; it was riven by an Iron Curtain. For more than four decades, America and the West confronted an implacable enemy on the other side of that divide. What finally defeated that enemy and ended the Cold War was not harmony and goodwill, but American strength and resolve. Obama's speech was a paean to international cooperation and unity. "Now is the time to join together," he said. "It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads." No -- it was a Democratic president named Truman, who had the audacity to order an airlift when others counseled retreat, and the grit to see it through when others were ready to withdraw. Sixty years later, it is a very different kind of Democrat who is running for president. Obama may have wowed 'em in Berlin, but he's no Harry Truman. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) 
-- ## -- To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) Jeff Jacoby's mailing list, please visit http://www.JeffJacoby.com. To see a month's worth of his recent columns, go to http://www.boston.com/bosto.... Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally. -- ## -- A good stat for golfers
THESE ARE (STILL) THE GOOD OLD DAYS By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe Wednesday, July 23, 2008 http://www.boston.com/bosto... Are you anxious? Dejected? Fearful? Why wouldn't you be, considering the barrage of rotten news assaulting you from every direction? "Everything seemingly is spinning out of control," moaned the apocalyptic headline on a recent Associated Press dispatch. "Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Airfares, college tuition, and healthcare border on unaffordable . . . Americans need do no more than check the weather, look in their wallets, or turn on the news for their daily reality check on a world gone haywire." Thanks in part to journalism of that caliber, consumers are more apprehensive than they have been in decades. Consumer confidence is at a 16-year low, while according to an ABC News-Washington Post poll, more Americans than ever, 84 percent, think the country is headed in the wrong direction. The New York Times devoted one-fourth of Saturday's front page to illustrating ways in which the economy is mired in "A Slowdown With Trouble at Every Turn" -- and continued the gloom for a full page inside. Voices of reason keep trying to point out that conditions are not nearly as bad as they were the last time consumers were this despondent. That was in May 1980, during the final year of the Carter administration, when the "misery index" -- the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates -- hit an excruciating 21.9. Inflation was then at 14.4 percent; unemployment was 7.5 percent. The numbers today are 5 and 5.5 respectively.
But voters don't want to be told to buck up. When former senator Phil Gramm, an economic adviser to John McCain, said last week that America had "become a nation of whiners" and described the current slowdown as a "mental recession," the backlash was immediate. McCain repudiated Gramm's remarks and quickly issued a statement assuring voters that he "travels the country every day talking to Americans who are hurting, feeling pain at the pump, and worrying about how they'll pay their mortgage." Well, that's politics. Politicians who want to get elected genuflect to what Bryan Caplan, in *The Myth of the Rational Voter* calls the pessimistic bias: the "tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the (recent) past, present, and future performance of the economy." For a nonpessimistic view, hearken to W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, who in the current issue of The American ask "How Are We Doing?" -- and offer some useful perspective. The nation's present troubles, they argue -- rising oil and food prices, Cox and Alm point to an array of reassuring trends. Americans on average work far less than they used to. Annual hours devoted to the job have fallen from 1,903 in 1950 to just 1,531 today. We start working later in life, retire earlier, and live much longer. Even including household labor, they write, "only about a quarter of our waking hours are consumed with work, down from 45 percent in 1950." The material progress of recent decades has been extraordinary -- at all income levels. Forty percent of poor families own their own homes. For many goods (kitchen appliances, color TVs, air conditioners) ownership rates are higher among poor Americans today than they were among the general population in 1970.
Short-term troubles notwithstanding, Cox and Alm observe, the "data points add up to steady, continuing progress for average Americans." So no, everything is not spinning out of control. Alarmist headlines notwithstanding, we're doing all right. Buck up. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
-- ## -- To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) Jeff Jacoby's mailing list, please visit http://www.JeffJacoby.com. To see a month's worth of his recent columns, go to http://www.boston.com/bosto.... Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally. DEMOCRATS, THE MILITARY, AND MCCAIN By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe Sunday, July 13, 2008 http://www.boston.com/bosto...
President Nixon greets returning POW John McCain in 1973
Four years ago, Democrats couldn't laud military service -- especially that of their presidential standard-bearer -- highly enough. John Kerry's short stint in Vietnam was repeatedly invoked as evidence of his character and fitness for leadership. "If you have any question about what John Kerry's made of," his running mate John Edwards would say, "just spend three minutes with the men who served with him 30 years ago." At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, photographs of Kerry's Navy days abounded -- Kerry posing with his officer class, Kerry on the Mekong Delta, Kerry receiving a medal. One of the convention's speakers was a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who praised Kerry's "bravery and great distinction" as a naval officer, describing him as someone who "knows from experience a commander's responsibility to his troops." Another speaker, former senator Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam veteran, reminded the delegates that Kerry had volunteered for combat duty. "There were a lot of other things he could have done with his life," Cleland said. But Kerry went to war “because he had been raised to believe that service to one's country is honorable, noble, and good.” Former President Bill Clinton said it even more bluntly: And who can forget Kerry himself, saluting and "reporting for duty" on the night he accepted his party's nomination?
Given that effusive show of respect for military experience in 2004, you would think no Democrat this year could even contemplate disparaging John McCain's far more extensive military career. The presumptive Republican nominee, after all, spent 22 years as a naval aviator; flew 23 combat missions over North Vietnam; earned numerous combat decorations, including the Silver Star and Legion of Merit; and demonstrated courage and self-sacrifice during 5½ years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. And yet in recent months, one Democrat after another has gone out of his way to diminish or criticize McCain's war record. A partial list: In April, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia denounced McCain as insensitive -- pointing, as evidence, to his military service. "McCain was a fighter pilot who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet," Rockefeller told the Charleston Gazette. "He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues." Rockefeller later apologized, but a few days later, it was George McGovern's turn. The former Democratic presidential nominee told an audience that he would like to say to McCain: "Neither of us is an expert on national defense. It's true that you went to one of the service academies, but you were in the bottom of the class." He added, tauntingly: "You were shot down early in the war and spent most of the time in prison. I flew 35 combat missions with a 10-man crew and brought them home safely every time."
Next came Barack Obama supporter Bill Gillespie, an Army veteran and Georgia congressional candidate who scorned McCain as a product of "Navy royalty," who was "given a silver spoon" but "needed to draw attention" to himself. Having been a POW made McCain "somewhat of a celebrity and it went to his head," Gillespie sniped. "I think he was a self-promoter." Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa told reporters in May that growing up in a family with a history of Navy service made McCain too military-oriented, "and he has a hard time thinking beyond that." He looks at everything "from his life experiences from always having been in the military," Harkin complained. "I think that can be pretty dangerous." Much attention was focused on retired General Wesley Clark's comments that McCain "hasn't held executive responsibility" and that "riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down" is no qualification for the Oval Office. Far more obnoxious was the claim by an informal Obama adviser, Rand Beers, that McCain's national security experience is "sadly limited" because he was a POW. “He was in isolation essentially for many of those years and did not experience the turmoil” of the antiwar movement,” said Beers, "or the challenges" faced by those who went ashore in Vietnam. Do Democrats only honor a military record when their nominee happens to be a veteran? In a recent speech, Obama mentioned McCain's wartime service, pointedly adding that "no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign." Now if only the rest of his party would listen. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
-- ## -- To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) Jeff Jacoby's mailing list, please visit http://www.JeffJacoby.com. To see a month's worth of his recent columns, go to http://www.boston.com/bosto.... Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id... This was a brave man and the video is heart wrenching. He leaves behind 3 young children.
DANCING ON THE GRAVE OF JESSE HELMS By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
http://www.boston.com/bosto...
Liberals didn't think much of Jesse Helms when he was alive, and their feelings didn't soften with his death.
“Jesse Helms, you rat bastard, burn in hell,” announced a headline at Daily Kos, the hugely popular left-wing blog; “Please excuse me while I dance upon his grave,” gloated another.
“I was on Castro and 18th at 9:30 p.m.,” reported a poster on Democratic Underground, another popular site, “and there was someone shouting, ‘Jesse Helms is dead!’ To which everyone in earshot burst into applause and cheering, myself included.”
In The Nation, the former North Carolina senator was memorialized as “Jesse Helms, American Bigot.” For its online audience, The Washington Post resurrected the column David Broder produced when Helms announced his retirement: “Jesse Helms, White Racist.”
The invective streamed in from across the pond as well. “There seemingly wasn't a right-wing, retrograde social issue Helms met that he didn't like,” wrote Melissa McEwan in a savage essay on the Guardian's website. “It was . . . his unmitigated intolerance toward people of color that will define his legacy.
Well, hating Helms is nothing new. More than 16 years ago, the scholar Charles Horner observed in Commentary that for many people Helms had become a “symbol of the evil against which all enlightened people are automatically ranged.” As with the poisonous rhetoric of today's pathological George W. Bush-haters, the point of the virulence expressed toward Helms was typically character-assassination, not contention -- it was aimed at demonizing the man rather than debating or disproving his ideas.
For some liberals, Helms's death had long been a fantasy. “I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind,” NPR's Nina Totenberg said in 1995, “because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion. Or one of his grandchildren will get it.”
What the left despised most about Helms varied with the seasons. There was his unyielding anticommunism. His visceral opposition to homosexuality. His war on government funding of obscene art. His blackball of William Weld's nomination as ambassador to Mexico. His staunch support of the tobacco industry. And, of course, his segregationist past.
In the one-dimensional demonology of the left, Helms comes across as an unreconstructed racist who dreamed of Jim Crow every night and whose first words each morning were “Segregation forever!” The truth was considerably different -- and more admirable.
Helms was a product of the racist Old South, and came to prominence as a foe of desegregation. “He battled as hard as any of them,” editorialized the conservative National Review in 2001, “a shameful legacy, of which he was never ashamed.” In those days Helms was a Democrat, as were most Southern segregationists. But by the time he entered Congress in 1973, he had changed both his party and his mind. Far from using his office to roll back civil rights, argued Walter Russell Mead, a noted scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, Helms “deserves to be remembered as one of a handful of men who brought white Southern conservatives into a new era of race relations.”
Mead, who grew up in the South, recalled listening as a boy to Helms's “anti-integration, anti-Martin Luther King commentaries on WRAL-TV.” But once the battle was over and the civil rights laws were passed, Mead wrote years later, Helms did something “very revolutionary for Southern white populists: He accepted the laws and obeyed them.” He shunned violence, hired black aides, and provided constituent services without regard to race. Instead of leading his followers into resistance, Helms “disciplined and tamed the segregationist South,” prodding it “into grudging acceptance of the new racial order.”
Yet rather than hail his statesmanship and acknowledge his contribution to the civil rights revolution, liberals marked his death by reaching for pejoratives. Helms's sin was not racism; it was his tenacious political incorrectness. Had he been willing to tack left on other issues, his racial wrongs would have been forgiven.
Consider, for a contrast, the treatment meted out to a different North Carolina senator: Helms's senior colleague, the late Sam Ervin. He was beloved by the left notwithstanding his defense of segregation and his vote against elevating Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. When Ervin died, The Washington Post's front-page obituary began by saluting him as a “hero to many” for his role in the Watergate hearings. His opposition to nearly every civil-rights bill of his career wasn't mentioned until the 24th paragraph -- of a 25-paragraph obituary.
The real Jesse Helms was never the cartoon villain his enemies so loved to hate. But then, he didn't much care what they thought while he was alive. He certainly doesn't care now.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
-- ## -- To subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) Jeff Jacoby's mailing list, please visit http://www.JeffJacoby.com. To see a month's worth of his recent columns, go to http://www.boston.com/bosto.... Jeff Jacoby welcomes comments and reads all his mail. Unfortunately, he receives so many letters that he cannot answer each one personally. How about you folks? What say we all just stop paying since it's voluntary? http://www.youtube.com/watc...
How campaign was conceived and exected by Zimbabwe's leader, aides. Has anyone been following the runoff election in Zimbabwe and the violence the madman president used to get elected? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id... And you guys thought the elections here in the states get rough. |
